I walk the fine line between helping companies improve their sales processes and being a lecturer in Global Marketing and Sales Management. Most of my business comes from referrals, and frequently it isn’t the Sales or Marketing teams that ask for me, it’s the FD or the CEO, and it usually starts with a question.

A year ago, the questions were mostly about negotiations (probably due to the word Brexit being used every day on the news). This year companies seem to have decided that whatever happens, happens: so, have been revisiting their internal challenges. It’s about getting fit for the future whatever that might look like.
One of the questions that has resurfaced tends to be from slightly frustrated Directors, “If Sales and Marketing people are the “Experts” on communication, why don’t they talk to each other?”

It’s not just the cross functional challenge however, sometimes the internal culture is just wrong. I know what you’re thinking “Oh No, Andrew has gone over to the soft and fluffy side using words like culture again” But bear with me…

Get a load of engineers in a room: one makes wheels, one makes axles, one makes brakes. They will talk to each other and share best practice resulting in improved efficiency and effectiveness.

Get a load of sales people in a room and its different. There is only one who is going to be the top salesperson of the month, and they will do anything (including dragging orders forward, not passing on leads etc.,) to be the one. I’m not saying competitiveness is a bad thing, but it needs to be about competitive team work not competitive individualism. Marketing teams can be just as bad, although they tend to be more analytical in their approach. Customer service is frequently seen and measured as a cost centre (how can we reduce this functions cost) rather than a profit centre (how can we improve the bottom line).

Sending sales and marketing teams on one a one day “team building” course just isn’t going to do it (especially if you don’t invite customer service because it’s not in the budget).

This is one of the sales & marketing questions we will be discussing on 30 November with Nick Brooks and his 4CM team who are the experts in B2B Marketing, and thought wouldn’t it be easier if we could help companies by facilitating this process?

If you have team challenges and would like to take part in the event, drop me a line or ring me on 07732 628113

As a lecturer in Global Marketing and Sales Management, I spend a lot of time challenging my students to answer the Big question: How would you sell ‘This’?

To keep up with changes in society and technology ‘This’ is changing rapidly, especially as the products, services and experiences that they will be selling may not yet exist. In the past year they have considered:

Space tourism (how do you sell a holiday for £500k when the customer has a good chance of never coming back alive?)

How do you sell autonomous vehicles (fine for the UK but probably not in Australia)?

How to sell cars to the 50% of the population of Saudi Arabia who (until this year) were not allowed to drive?

Each of these Big questions is totally different, and as with real life, there is no silver bullet answer. I guide the students through a process that helps them understand the real challenges by asking the little questions that will eventually lead them to potential Big answers.

Similarly, when I work with organisations, the Big question tends to be ‘How do we sell MORE of This?’

The challenge here is not the question itself; it is not a dumb question, it is just being asked at the wrong time. We need to ask more little questions first to understand why a potential customer would want to buy what the company is selling. As with the student Big questions, there are many possible answers. This is not a precise art, but it can be a great way of avoiding the wrong answers.

So, what are the little questions that should be asked before the big question? Well, there are more than I can put in a readable blog, so I’ve developed a questionnaire to help.

Questions do differ from company to company, and answers will differ even more. Many of the answers will be hiding in plain sight, and just the experience of asking yourself these questions might help you in your search of the Big Question.

More recently, I have been discussing this situation with Nick Brooks and his team at 4CM who are the experts in B2B Marketing, and thought wouldn’t it be easier if we could jointly help companies by facilitating this process?

This autumn, we will be holding a sales and marketing seminar in Milton Keynes for manufacturing and industrial companies. This will help you think differently about your customers to develop techniques that will drive sustainable revenue growth.

If you’d like to attend this FREE event, then simply drop me an email!

The number of university attendees in the UK has risen in the last few years, and if there is one component which all Universities build into their curriculum, especially into their Masters level courses, it is the encouragement of critical thinking as a skill-set. Many of these graduates will be the decision makers of the future, i.e. your potential customers.

What will be different in the future?

If we look at B2B purchases they tend to be one of 3 types:
•Straight Rebuy
•Modified Rebuy
•New Buy

Each of these types of purchases tends to have different levels of risk attached to the buying process.

Straight Rebuy – A company that buys white A4 80gsm copy paper would probably have a process in place for the purchase, the buyer knows the price in the market, understands the batch quantity, and has experience of the vendor.

Modified Rebuy – one or more aspects of the purchase may differ from a straight rebuy – so buying coloured A1 200 gsm paper may cause the buyer to consider shopping around in the market place.

New Buy – Most companies would tend to procure a new photocopier less often than they would buy the copy paper. They have less knowledge of what is available in the marketplace, it is a higher value, and a higher risk value for the buyer.

In order to reduce costs, organisations will seek to automate the straight rebuys and standardise the modified rebuys. On the other side of the equation, if a purchase is a new buy (and with products and services becoming more innovative in order to remain competitive, then the trend will be to move towards either Modified Rebuys or New Buys), then the decision makers will probably move towards a personal default.

The challenge with University educated buyers is that their decision making default for new buys will probably include an element of critical thinking. As sales managers we need to understand the customers mind; not just why they buy, but also the when, where and how.

So when did you last send your sales managers off to University to learn how to understand the buyers of the future?

It’s Friday afternoon, and you pick up a voicemail from your client about the sale you thought you had closed earlier in the week. “I’m sure there is nothing to worry about, but our legal guys have a couple of questions, let me get back to you in a week or so.”

Bang goes the quota for this quarter.

And that’s just the start, the longer an opportunity is in process, the more chance there is of it dropping out, your contacts leaving, new people starting, budgets getting reviewed, strategies and business models changing and competitors submitting an improved offer.

Following on from an EU funded project, I’ve been working with David Miller, Head of Commercial at solicitors Flint Bishop, on the best way to integrate legal requirements into the sales process. The objective being to change what is normally perceived as a constraint into a competitive advantage. The main purpose of the sales process is to facilitate the buying process, but a sales process also needs to be ethical, legal and profitable.

If we consider that the sales process (in its widest sense) consists of 3 main components: Structure (based on your route to market), Phases – typically FIND, WIN, DELIVER and KEEP, and Stages (the tactical actions, activities and handovers between the phases), Then integrating legal know how into a good sales process will help you Increase sales, reduce costs and manage your risk – So just a few pointers

Structure:
• When did you last review your selling documentation?
• Was the review conducted from a purely legal point of view or did this include an overview of your sales process and your customers buying process?
• Has your business model or products /services changed?
• Are you selling to different types of customers, or into different jurisdictions?

Phases.
• What data can you legally collect and store about customers and your competition?
• What information can you legally use?
• If you use sales agents – are you at risk with EU directives?
• Do your “Opt Out” clauses mean that your email campaigns are at risk?
• When you mapped out your sales phases did you involve legal in the team?

Stages.
• When do you introduce Non-Disclosure Agreements into the conversation?
• When should legal get involved?
• What can you put on the CRM?
• When did anybody from “Legal” attend a sales meeting?
• Do you ask for copies of the customers purchasing terms early on in the process?

Quite often there are multiple cut and paste variations of legal documents held in numerous places, with copies in the Legal department, on the sales teams laptops, on share points and even on USBs. Many are out of date, leading to problems discovered later in the process. So consider just two copies – one held by the legal team and another on your CRM. (A good CRM such as Pipeliner has the ability to store the documents at the point when they are needed in the sales process). Then give your internal legal team an admin seat on the CRM so they can keep the documents up to date. Your internal legal team may well be busy firefighting, as typically everything they get will be urgent (be honest, when was the last time that you asked for a job to be put at the bottom of their in tray?).

If you don’t have an internal legal team, or they are tasked with other projects, then consider building in a legal review with your annual sales process audit. Building legal knowledge into the design of your sales process will help you improve your sales, manage your risk and reduce your costs.

If you would like to learn more about how Lean 4 Sales can improve your sales process, contact me on 0773 262 8113 or email andrew@lean4sales.com

When I was a youngster selling British building materials to Japanese contractors in Saudi Arabia, one of my colleagues used to trot out the same phrase every time an opportunity got stuck in the sales pipeline, “Business is easy, it is people that make it difficult!”

As a newcomer to sales, I stupidly thought that the people he referred to were the customers, and it never occurred to me that he was talking about the other stakeholders (credit control, legal, suppliers, logistics etc.,). I naively thought that the only people I could and should influence were my clients, after all wasn’t that my job?

Many years passed (I am a slow learner) before I realised that the other people he had referred to weren’t trying to make my life difficult for the good of their health, it was merely that they were working within a fractured system and had a mortgage to pay! The root cause of the difficulty was not with the people, it was with the system.

In larger complex sales (where the buying decision has multiple influencers), the vendor may also be of a similar size and complexity. The business development function then becomes one of facilitating the purchase process, while guiding the project through the vendor’s internal structure.

As these are large projects, they are treated individually and there is little standardisation, so every contract gets assessed and verified by the legal, financial and operational teams; on both the client and the vendors side. Because of this there are numerous delays; the longer the cycle time, the larger the risk that individuals (including the business development manager and his / her opposite number at the clients) will leave the organisation causing further delays. Stage gating in the sales process can also cause challenges; so include a swim lane tool when you map out the sales process, and consider parallel working, e.g. could finance and legal reviews run concurrently?

Tactical timing is also an issue. For instance a vendor may prefer not to have an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) in place until it has been fully ratified by both sides; but the client needs one in place straight away. I would suggest that you embed the required documents in your crm system, where they are easy to access rather than putting them in a separate area. Most good crm systems now offer this facility. I’m currently working with a couple of firms of solicitors to help their clients embed relevant up to date documentation into the clients’ sales processes (When did you last consider IP agreements in a sales meeting!)

Helping your client with the relevant documentation at the right time is a good start to reducing your risk, increasing your revenues and reducing your cost. Mapping out your generic “large sale” sales processes, aligning them with the procurement processes of your clients, and putting together a team to standardise up to date pre contract documentation (rather than reinventing the wheel every time) is good practice.

If you would like a review of your “large sale” process contact me on 0773 262 8113 or email andrew@lean4sales.com

I’ve always been a big believer in the concept that if you put enough people in a room with a large enough pot of coffee, eventually you can probably solve the majority of problems. I was thinking about this the other day when I was in a meeting with some academics discussing effectiveness (doing the right thing) and efficiency (doing the thing right).

When we think of scientific history; names such as Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci and Darwin spring to mind. These polymaths were able to take their learnings from one discipline and utilise them in others. Over the years this need for understanding of different bodies of knowledge has been replaced with specialisation. Universities receive a growing amount of their funding from research and teaching in specialist areas, and this has led to even more concentration within the disciplines. The graduates of today will tend to have come through an educational process where they have concentrated on one specific subject or group of subjects.

Sales as a discipline shares some of the same contradictions. When I speak to companies about their searches for a new sales manager, their perfect candidate tends to be either a mirror image of their previous manager, or look like the sales manager of their largest competitor, it’s all about experience. “We need him (and yes unfortunately it is normally a “him”) to have X years experience in the sector, a load of contacts, and be able to hit the ground running…”

Yet when the same companies seek a new marketing manager, the first qualification is one of academics – does he or she (yes thankfully marketing seems to be more diverse than sales!) have an MBA or MSc in Marketing Management?

The contradiction with both of these approaches is that the company gene pool remains the same size, leading to more specialisation, which may improve efficiency but can reduce effectiveness in your sales process. The net result being that your newly recruited sales manager takes time getting on board, revenues do not improve sufficiently, and you find yourself repeating the whole process 18 months later.
One of the ways to increase your understanding of the contradiction is by using TRIZ tools. Instead of looking at the recruitment and selection of a sales manager as an end in itself, we should see it as an opportunity to improve the system.

Ideal Final Result – a vision of the perfect end result – no constraints – no “we can’t have this because…” Think like Leonardo da Vinci who said “Think of the end before the beginning.” Thinking about what you want rather than what you currently have. The underlying philosophy of TRIZ is to deliver more for less, finding solutions to problems for a minimum of cost and harm. The concept of an Ideal Final Result frees thinking away from constraints and why something can’t be done, to what might be possible and how to achieve it.

Everyone’s Ideal Result – makes you look at the problem from both yours and other stakeholder’s point of view (Customer, marketing, operations, legal, finance etc.,) Ask what is the effect on the sales process if the role is not filled. Consider the purpose, the main function you are seeking, does the role need to be full time?
Functionality, Harms and Benefits – Have you listed everything you want the candidate to have (must haves / nice to haves), everything you don’t want (You don’t see this on job specifications!). Check why you want specific skillsets, does the role now even resemble the “we need a sales manager to replace the one who left to join our competitor”?

A good recruitment consultant or HR partner will help, but both are only as good as the brief they are given, so take time thinking about what is really important, and whether efficiency or effectiveness should be your priority. If a consultant you do not regularly use takes your brief over the phone in a couple of minutes and just sends you a shed load of cv’s, then consider moving your business. Taking the time to build a relationship with an HR partner or consultant or who will understand your challenges thoroughly can be a great investment.

Conclusion If you revisit your sales process before you replace your sales manager, you will probably find that you can recruit from a wider and more diverse group, enabling you to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of your Find, Win, Deliver and Keep sales phases.
Lean 4 Sales can help you review and improve your sales process – email andrew@lean4sales.com

Process improvement is about solving problems, and the Sales and Marketing functions have these in bulk. The frameworks I use have proved themselves in manufacturing and operations processes over many years, and understanding how other disciplines treat similar contradictions is one of the pillars of TRIZ, so bear with me here….!

One of the sales functions largest challenges is the lack of visibility in the buying process. A good crm system (such as Pipeliner) and an investment in business intelligence will help but interrogating customers about their buying process may well interfere with the sale.

In Quality and Manufacturing literature this change of outcome due to observation tends to be discussed mostly in terms of the Hawthorne effect. In research (especially psychology research) this frequently comes under the category of “Demand Characteristics”.

In Star Trek they had a similar challenge, their prime directive stated that they must not interfere in other cultures, yet the very act of watching could cause changes. So the contradiction they faced was how to “boldly go” and yet understand how these alien worlds worked.
They got round this by using gravitational lensing to understand the effect the alien planet had on its environment rather than taking a piccy of the alien planet itself, in effect they were using leading and lagging indicators.

Ah! I hear you say, but it won’t work in sales. Well actually we tend to use leading indicators quite a lot in forecasting; for instance, Builders Merchants use planning consents, Supermarkets use the weather, so nothing scary there, it is a question of identifying and interpreting the right indicators.

Indicators may well be hiding in plain sight, so a structured workshop might just be the way forward – and may the TRIZ be with you!